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Alpine Linux sucks for hosting Docker Containers

After setting up Alpine Linux to run docker containers and fixing a whole bunch of issues I encountered, I now came to the point where I tried to run a node.js app inside a Docker Container that runs on an Alpine Linux Host. But node immediately exited with a Segmentation Fault. After some experimenting, I went and just started the official node docker container in the latest version and started node inside. It still didn’t work.

First, some network config changes done by docker, then docker complains about missing support for nested cgroups, then some more network config changes before node crashes with a segmentation fault. And eventually some error messages because GRSEC prevents node from writing a core dump.

As with all Linux distributions, if I can’t get them to run properly after a few hours of trying, I throw them away and won’t touch them again for a few years. Now I have added Alpine Linux to that list. Fortunately, there are enough alternatives out there.

But since I’m not really interested of trying out many different Linux distributions, I’ll just go back to Ubuntu. Yes, it is still a ~600 MB download instead of an 80 MB one but at least it works most of the time.

2 thoughts on “Alpine Linux sucks for hosting Docker Containers”

FYI this is happening because Alpine doesn’t use GlibC but rather uses Musl so a lot of things need recompiling – switching to a glibc based Alpine will do the trick. Alpine does have a few quirks for new comers which can make it frustrating